More server chips means more…guess

With all of the hype around tablets, smartphones, and thus SSD or NAND Flash (read “The death of the hard drive…”), it’s refreshing to hear Intel bring everyone back down to earth a bit.  In a Business Week article posted January 14, 2011, Michael Shinnick, a fund manager for South Bend, Indiana-based Wasatch Advisors Inc. said, “So many people are focused on the front end, on the consumer — the phone and tablet — and missing the fact that there are these massive arrays of servers, largely populated by Intel chips.”   And Seagate hard drives I might add.

It’s true.

With all the fuss over tablet computing at CES and make no mistake, I am a believer in the tablet movement, but not so much as a killer to traditional IT infrastructure and the need for hard drive based storage.  Sure, Intel provides a completely different component than an hard drive, and is not faced with competing technology like SSD, but you cannot argue that server chip sales  almost always equate to enterprise hard drive sales.

The article cites Intel’s delay in attacking the tablet market combined with the tablet’s supposed cannibalization of laptop computers as reason for concern… but then goes on to indicate Intel said, “sales of chips used in so-called cloud-computing centers, which provide computing over the Web, helped boost fourth- quarter sales and profit even as consumer demand for notebooks remained sluggish.” Intel promises a whole host of tablets later this year with it’s Atom processor integrated.

Like Intel, hard drive companies are not ignoring the tablet craze either.  Seagate, among others, has a Momentus Thin drive with capacities up to 320GB that’s only 7mm thick. And,  Seagate also teased about a nice tablet add-on with it’s ultra-thin GoFlex portable drive which measures on 9mm thick compared to the existing 14.5mm GoFlex portables.  Not to mention the whole home NAS with remote access deal which is a nice complimentary product to tablets.  I also hear there is even more game changing technology coming from Seagate later this year…just don’t have any details to share at the moment, so stay tuned.

In any case, let’s put this together…

More tablets means more demand on the cloud, which means more servers, which means more server processors, which means more hard drives…and an occasional enterprise SSD thrown in for good measure.

We got those too.

Related Posts

The death of the hard drive? C’mon people…
Biggest server monsters taking over the world, Exabyte by Exabyte
Cliff Notes: Seagate whitepaper on cloud computing

GoFlex Image by: http://www.laptopmag.com/mobile-life/best-of-ces-2011.aspx#axzz1B3IgmgV6

2011-01-18T12:03:19+00:00

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3 Comments

  1. […] More server chips means more…guess 1TB Smartphone, 100TB Portable drive, 1PB Home NAS Funny Seagate Momentus XT Commercial “Digital” Storage Wars…a reality show that’s not on TV “About you” file-size: 200 Gigabytes What happened to “old-school” mobile video? […]

  2. […] More server chips means more…guess CES 2011: functionality will “drive” capacity The “stars” are aligned for cloud storage Biggest server monsters taking over the world, Exabyte by Exabyte Cliff Notes: Seagate whitepaper on cloud computing […]

  3. […] Servers: Today, Bloomberg reports: “Intel Server-Chip Sales Fueled by Mobile Data, CFO Says” which further supports the notion that more smartphones and tablets sold mean more servers and storage sold, thus more hard drives. And not just growth, “explosive” growth, Intel’s Chief Financial Officer Stacy Smith says.  Per Bloomberg, “There’s a significant, maybe even an insatiable, demand driver for more and more performance and computing power that’s moving into the cloud,” Smith said in an interview yesterday. “What gets lost is the explosive growth of all of these devices connecting to the Internet is driving a $10 billion dollar server business.” The impact of smartphones and tablets and cloud computing is real…real good.  The article goes on to say that Intel’s forecast second-quarter revenue may be about $1 billion more than analysts had estimated. And like I have said before, more server chips = more hard drives. […]

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